Back on track

After much planning and indecision as to what direction to take i am finally back in the model railways game.  Project Eskalon is my return to model railways after nearly 2 decades away from the scene and i chose to go for a HOe scale layout based on the Austrian mountain narrow gauge Zillertalbahn. Today i got my first train and a loop of track so i can do some experimentation and also have a play! A proper permanent layout will follow later in the year but for now...

We have motion vine.co/v/b1WPLxAb0j2
— Chris Davies (@chrischowdavies) January 31, 2013

As we now have something running i can also officially launch a blog which will accompany my new adventures in 1:87 scale.

Original instagram

You may have noticed that since i got an iPhone last Spring i have preferred to use Instagram photos for blog posts. This is because i think the format and size works well with the blog, and also looks fairly cool. Before the invention of instagram we had to do photos like that the old fashioned way of course with film cameras. I found a few old photos my Dad took in the early 70s when we lived in Crosby. These were his prized roses that he had to leave behind when we moved to Birmingham! To think that it requires a lot of computing power and software to produce such a photo now...

Vine

Vine is Twitter's new video creation and sharing tool and very nice it is too. You create a 6 second long video using your phone when it then posted to your twitter feed. At the moment its a bit gimmicky but i am sure that soon (if not already) someone has come up with something awesome. Here is my first attempt (which isn't that awesome but its a start right?)

Dance for me professor vine.co/v/b5TpZL0pa5m
— Chris Davies (@chrischowdavies) January 25, 2013

How do you turn music into money?

How do you turn your music into money? Of course everyone does it for the sake of the music but that doesn't pay the gas bill. This interesting article shows how an independent artist (Zoe Keating a cellist) makes her money. Basically she makes most of it from iTunes with Bandcamp and Amazon also providing the bulk of her revenue. Streaming sites like Spotify only provide a small amount of income though as with anything the exact mix will depend on the artist and their genre.

The message surely has to be though that by cutting out the middle man (i.e. the major record labels) then artists can be best rewarded for their art. Thats what we indie kids have been saying all along...

HOe the way?

After planning my future return to model railways i did at least explore the possibility of an OO scale layout as in the past i have found N scale too fiddly (i am not blessed with dexterity or small fingers) however in the space available an OO scale layout is not really feasible unless i settle on an end-to-end layout and to be honest i've found them a bit dull to operate in the past.

But then reading Continental Modeller i had a revelation, why not narrow gauge? In particular HOe which uses HO stock (which is only a little bit smaller than OO) but with N gauge track! Is this the best of both worlds? Maybe. It does mean having a continental based layout though and i am thinking on one based on the Austrian Zillertalbahn but thats fine as a continental layout has always been an ambition of mine. Liliput make some lovely stock such as D13.

More research is needed but i think we might just have found the winning formula.

A return to film (again)

Yesterday i received through the post via eBay a new old Kodak Pocket Instamatic camera. I did buy one before a couple of years earlier and took a few rolls (or cartridges) of 110 format photographs with it before i ended up dropping the camera! Actually i think the camera itself still works though the rangefinder did go a bit funny...

Anyway i shall try to not drop this other Instamatic (its a Model 91 which doesn't have a range finger anyway!) I've got quite a few unused 110 format films left to use (though all time expired) and have bought a couple of new films off the Lomo site so this year i plan to do quite a bit "retro" photography. I really like the feel of these old photos sometimes, even Instagram and the likes can't quite (re-)capture it.